Flowers, Garland Makers, and Discard in Contemporary Bangkok

In contemporary Bangkok, flowers are instrumental to religious life. Buddhists daily offer fresh garlands to temples to accrue merit and to ask deities for blessings. But over the past fifty years, the craftspeople who make these garlands have been forcibly removed from the city, deemed an aesthetic “blight” to the modern landscape. What is the future of these workers in a city that at once needs them and discards them? I answer this question by analyzing a fresh flower chandelier installation created by my interlocutor, a queer Thai flower artist, which premiered in 2025 at Singapore’s international art fair. Lowering the chandelier to the ground, the garlands on the bottom break, providing a soft bed for the more expensive garlands; lower-class workers are breaking under the weight of class inequality. The future is not hopeless. Through developing more intimate relationships with flowers, Bangkokians can cultivate greater movements of class solidarity.